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Matsumoto Toshio was a documentary filmmaker, director of "the first experimental film in postwar Japan," and one of a new cohort of theorists in the late 1950s who inspired the work of ambitious film and television documentary makers as well as becoming a key theoretical inspiration for the Japanese new wave. In addition to his own documentaries, he made groundbreaking experiments in expanded cinema and video art, and he combined those various aspects of his work in his famous feature Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no s?oretsu, 1969). Born in Nagoya in 1931, Matsumoto graduated from the Art History section of the Literature Department of Tokyo University in 1955. At university he was a member of the communist-affiliated student union, Zengakuren, and took part in the 1952 Bloody May Day protests. After graduation, Matsumoto joined documentary producer Shin Riken Eiga in 1955 and directed the recently rediscovered Silver Wheels (Ginrin, 1955), simultaneously the earliest example of postwar Japanese experimental cinema and a film promoting Japanese bicycle exports. Ironically, public relations films made by companies such as Iwanami Films and Tokyo Cinema, the audiovisual background of high economic growth, were made by the most leftist filmmakers in Japan: a combination of prewar veterans of the proletarian cinema movement, refugees from the occupation-era purges of the studio ranks, and politically active students who had found it difficult to enter the conservative film studios in the 1950s.
After joining Shin Riken, a film company that specialized in science documentaries and industrial promotion films, Matsumoto attended the study group of the Kiroku Kyoiku Eiga Seisaku Kyogikai (the Documentary and Educational Film Producers Conference, known in Japanese by the contraction Seikyo), run by left-wing documentarists such as Atsugi Taka and Noda Shinkichi. The group went on to found Kiroku eiga (Documentary film), the journal in which Matsumoto first published "On the Method of Avant-Garde Documentary" in June 1958. Postwar Japanese intellectual life in the arts revolved less around universities than "study groups" such as this. Further research on these important institutions would greatly enrich our understanding of Japanese film culture. In addition to Seikyo, Matsumoto was also associated with the Ao no Kai (Blue Group) of filmmakers at Iwanami Films, the Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai (Documentary Arts Group) with critic...